[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 69 (Tuesday, April 29, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3484-S3496]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    FAA REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2007

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the bill by title.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       A bill (H.R. 2881) to amend title 49, United States Code, 
     to authorize appropriations for the Federal Aviation 
     Administration for fiscal years 2008 through 2011, to improve 
     aviation safety and capacity, to provide stable funding for 
     the national aviation system, and for other purposes.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.


                           Amendment No. 4585

                (Purpose: In the nature of a substitute)

  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Madam President, I call up my amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from West Virginia [Mr. Rockefeller], for 
     himself, Mr. Inouye, Mr. Baucus, and Mr. Grassley, proposes 
     an amendment numbered 4585.

  (The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of 
Amendments.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Salazar). The Senator from West Virginia.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, as I was indicating, I do not think 
most of our colleagues--they pick on certain subjects within aviation 
that are of interest that have hot buttons to them--look at the general 
situation of where the U.S. commercial aviation industry is, how bad 
its situation is, and I think it is time to tell the truth about that 
before we begin the debate on this bill.
  After posting nearly $35 billion in cumulative net losses from 2001 
through 2005, over the past 2 years, American commercial air carriers 
were able to recover financially for a brief period from the effects of 
September 11's grounding and subsequent adjustments. That is 
understandable.

[[Page S3485]]

  Domestic airlines earned an estimated net profit of roughly $3.8 
billion last year, more than twice the $1.7 billion net profits they 
achieved in 2006. That would appear to be going in the right direction. 
This year, however, marks a turning point, which I fear will be a 
sustained downturn in the industry's long-term outlook. Within the past 
week alone, we saw the Nation's third largest carrier--Delta--announce 
a first quarter loss of $6.4 billion. On that same day, the Nation's 
fifth largest airline--Northwest Airlines--posted a quarterly loss of 
$4.1 billion.
  This month, we witnessed four of our airlines--Frontier Airlines, 
Aloha Airlines, ATA Airlines, and Skybus Airlines--forced to declare 
bankruptcy. Four airlines collapse in 1 month, and two airlines 
announce a combined loss of $10.5 billion in one single quarter. I 
think this underscores the dangerous direction in which I believe our 
aviation industry is now truly heading.
  It is clear that in 2008 this industry is moving through what could 
be one of the most tumultuous periods it has ever experienced in our 
history. The recent window of profitability that commercial aviation 
experienced now seems to have closed. A worrying question for all of 
us--and for the future of our economy--is whether these losses will 
come to characterize its long-term financial outlook. I fear it will.
  The challenges confronting our Nation's aviation market have now 
sharply affected a variety of consumers and stakeholders. Airline 
companies have been posting multibillion dollar losses this quarter 
alone. Tired and frustrated passengers are being caught up in the 
thousands of flights that have been canceled or delayed due to a number 
of things, including safety issues. A quarter of the airline industry's 
entire workforce have lost their jobs since the year 2000. I will 
repeat that: One quarter of the airline industry's entire workforce 
have lost their jobs since 2000. The air traffic control system remains 
outdated. As I indicated, we are trying to catch up with Mongolia. And 
management problems continue to beset the industry's overseer, the 
Federal Aviation Administration.
  Compounding all of these difficulties is the reality that the 
industry is operating against a backdrop of a weaker American economy 
and general turmoil in global credit markets. Aside from all this, 
however, there remains one factor that has done more to change the face 
of the commercial aviation sector than any other; that is; the 
escalating cost of its lifeblood. We call it the price of oil.
  To illustrate this dramatic spike in costs, it is worth recalling 
that back in 2000 the price of oil stood at $30 a barrel. Recently, oil 
prices have been approaching $120 a barrel. But this does not 
necessarily reflect the true cost to the airlines, as there is a 
difference between the price of oil and the price of jet fuel, what the 
industry refers to as the ``crack spread.'' This means that, for 
example, on April 18, 2008, when oil was trading at nearly $116 a 
barrel, the price of jet fuel per barrel was trading at nearly $144--
$116 for a barrel of oil becomes $144 for airplanes.
  Such a dramatic increase in the industry's largest single cost 
clearly illustrates the extent of the problem it must absorb. With oil 
prices alone having risen 75 percent in the past year, it is somewhat 
unsurprising that the move toward further consolidation is gaining in 
speed.
  It seems increasingly inevitable that the Delta-Northwest merger 
proposal will unleash a wave--a further wave--of industry 
consolidation. I note that various airlines have been considering a 
number of possible pairings for some time now.
  In September 2005, US Airways and America West Airlines merged. In 
2007, US Airways pursued an unsuccessful bid for Delta, and Midwest 
Airlines was purchased jointly by Texas Pacific Group and Northwest.
  Numerous reports also indicate that further consolidation between 
United Airlines and Continental Airlines is likely--we will see--to 
happen as a consequence of the move by Delta and Northwest to 
consolidate--the domino theory.
  With the emphasis on pursuing market share prior to 9/11, the big air 
carriers are now focused on route and flight profitability and are less 
willing to fly half-empty planes to keep their nationwide networks 
competitive. In an effort to improve their financial standings and 
compete with smaller carriers, many legacy airlines--commercial 
airlines--have aggressively sought to cut costs by reducing labor 
expenditures and by decreasing capacity through cuts to flight 
frequency, use of smaller aircraft, or the elimination of service 
altogether to some communities.
  The major U.S. carriers have shown much more capacity discipline over 
the past few years and have retired, to their credit, many older, 
inefficient aircraft. Available seat miles--which is a term of art: a 
measure of capacity--increased only 0.3 percent in 2006, down from a 
3.3-percent increase in 2005, and an 8.7-percent increase in 2004. As a 
result, load factors have increased by more than 10 percent since 2000, 
bringing in more revenue per operation. Profitability. Statistics from 
the Air Transport Association show that the legacy carriers' combined 
fleet was 2,860 aircraft in 2006, an 18-percent reduction from almost 
3,500 planes at the end of 2000. So it has gone from 3,500 planes in 
2000 to 2,800 aircraft in 2006. That is clearly a trend.

  In West Virginia, aviation represents about $3.4 billion of the 
State's gross domestic product. To us, that is a rather huge figure. It 
employs over 50,000 people in our State. So the State has a direct 
interest in the impact any consolidation within the industry may have 
on services. I know the Presiding Officer knows that feeling.
  I have said before that while I am not unilaterally opposed to 
consolidation, I do believe every transaction has to be considered on 
its own merits. With regard to Delta-Northwest as a merger, I believe 
it is critical that the Federal agencies examine the fine details of 
the merger thoroughly before approving it.
  Now, this is of particular concern to me because Delta and Northwest 
provide critical air services to my State of West Virginia that allow 
businesses in our State to be connected with the rest of the world. I 
have said in the past, and I reiterate here today, that air services to 
small communities in my State and across the country depend on network 
carriers that use hub-and-spoke operations. There are no other 
sustainable options available to us. None. We have very few private 
aircraft, and obviously they are not available for commercial use. Low-
cost carriers are not going to serve West Virginia's communities 
because we do not have the volume of passengers to work with their 
business models.
  My State needs healthy network carriers if we are to attract new air 
services. At present, low-cost carriers are not going to fill the 
service void in our markets. It disturbs me, then, that since March 13 
of this year alone, American air carriers have exited from 86 routes 
throughout the country, my guess would be all of them rural. I fear 
these airlines plan to exit many other routes in the future.
  It was to ensure West Virginians continued access to adequate air 
services that I helped to create and expand the Small Community Air 
Service Development Program and the Essential Air Service Program. Both 
of these arrangements provide a Federal subsidy for air carriers to 
operate out of very rural areas. From my perspective, an adequate air 
service in West Virginia is not just a convenience but it is a flatout 
economic necessity for our survival.
  The airline industry is not only about the viability of the companies 
that it comprises. It is important that we not forget the increasingly 
large number of American passengers who underwrite the industry by 
consuming its services each year. Passenger traffic demand has now 
surpassed pre-9/11 levels, with total passenger enplanements of 745 
million in 2006, nearly 12 percent higher than the 666 million 
passengers who enplaned in 2000. The FAA's most recent forecast 
estimates passenger enplanements will grow to 794 million in 2008.
  We are all aware and have probably often experienced ourselves the 
delays and the cancellations that seem to be a growing feature of this 
industry. Air carriers and their passengers continue to be plagued by 
severe weather problems--which seem more than normal each year--and an 
air traffic control system that lacks the necessary capacity to handle 
demand effectively. That is why, when we talk about building an air 
traffic control system, which is at

[[Page S3486]]

least up to Mongolia--and as I said this morning, that is a little bit 
of an exaggeration because they had no air traffic, and so they started 
with what we want to move to. They started with what they should have 
started with, and that is digital GPS.
  These conditions produced near gridlock at several key gateway 
airports throughout the country this past summer which almost matched 
the record delays reached in the summer of 2000. Congestion and delay 
problems cost the airlines and passengers billions of dollars each year 
in lost productivity, canceled flights, and, obviously, fuel expenses.
  The severe congestion and delay problems that continue to plague air 
carriers and their passengers further exacerbate the high cost, 
therefore, of fuel. Inclement weather, an out-of-date air traffic 
control system, and management problems keep planes in the sky longer, 
which only increases fuel-burn. Due to these conditions, only 69 
percent of reported commercial airline operations arrived at their 
destination on time during June and July of 2007.
  I am pleased we have been able to work with the FAA on several 
efforts currently underway to address these problems, including a 
continuous focus on expanding infrastructure and adopting operational 
procedures, such as the implementation of reduced separation 
requirements and programs such as this fascinating acronym, the Area 
Navigation and Required Navigation Performance program, that permit 
more precise navigation of aircraft. But, you see, that is very 
difficult to do with x ray, with ground radio. That is why we need an 
air traffic control system which is modern, as every other modern 
country in the world has. Furthermore, since many of these delays 
originate in the New York City airspace, the FAA has committed itself 
to taking a number of specific steps to relieve congestion there--and I 
applaud them for that--including airspace redesign and the opening of 
military airspace to create additional capacity during particularly 
congested times.
  All of these efforts are a part of a longer term endeavor to solve 
these problems by modernizing the entire air transportation system 
through the implementation of the Next Generation Air Transportation 
System, the system I have been talking about a good deal. I am 
confident we can continue to pursue a workable strategy to increase the 
capacity of the National Airspace System to keep pace with projected 
growth and demand for air travel while ensuring that we continue to 
operate the world's safest aviation system. But then again, you always 
have to look underneath the figures.
  The pending Delta-Northwest merger could represent an absolute 
watershed moment in aviation industry history which would have a 
dramatic and wide-ranging impact on the industry, passengers, 
employees, and our national economy. This merger is emblematic of the 
aviation sector's future, in my judgment. We must acknowledge that a 
greater degree of consolidation is becoming simply unavoidable due to 
pressing economic factors, and we have no excuse to not manage these 
changes responsibly.
  I will always remain a fierce defender of West Virginia's right to 
adequate and reliable air services. That is why I went there in the 
first place. That is why I am there. I fight for fairness, and we don't 
have it in aviation, and I fear losing more of it. Even in these new 
challenging times for the sector, I will continue to ensure that my 
State is not adversely affected by this consolidation or any 
consolidation.
  Finally, I am concerned that even when the aviation industry did 
return to profitability over the past 2 years, services in my State did 
not dramatically improve or expand. They weren't investing. Now that 
the sector looks to be heading toward a more decidedly bleak future 
over a prolonged period, our efforts need to be redoubled so as to 
ensure crucial air services to small and rural communities everywhere 
are rightfully defended.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, today we debate the FAA reauthorization, 
and it is a debate that probably should have been joined a long time 
ago. This is a piece of legislation that has been kicking around here 
for a long time. I serve on the Senate Commerce Committee. I know both 
the House and the Senate reported bills out many months ago. We are 
finally now getting a bill on to the floor for debate. It is important 
we do this.
  This is legislation that is critical to the infrastructure that 
supports our aviation industry, which is a critical industry to 
America's competitiveness, and if we look at what is happening in the 
airlines these days, obviously, we need to do everything we can to make 
sure we have a viable and effective aviation industry and commercial 
airlines are able to operate and provide the services to travelers who 
need to get, every single day, to places both here at home and around 
the world to conduct business and to recreate.
  In the course of this debate, I cannot help but be struck by the fact 
that I do not see there is anything we can do in the FAA 
reauthorization that addresses what fundamentally is probably plaguing 
the airline industry more than anything else, and that is the high cost 
of energy.
  I am looking at some information, graphs, some data. We can look at 
this graph for January of 2004 and see where the cost of crude oil and 
the cost of fuel for the airlines, for the aviation industry, was then 
and where it is today. Follow the red line, the way it tracks up. That 
spikes up. That is almost a straight vertical line.
  If we take another graph which shows what the consumption of fuels is 
in the airline industry, the green line--you probably, Mr. President, 
cannot see this; it is too far away, but the green line shows 
consumption has been fairly static in terms of the amount of fuel that 
is used. But if we look at the expense or the cost of the fuel, it has 
increased at a sharp and dramatic rate.
  My point very simply is that we cannot affect, I do not think, in a 
very substantial way, what is plaguing and ailing the airline industry 
and a lot of other industries in this country absent addressing the 
fundamental cost issue of energy independence.
  If we look at where we are as a nation today and where we were 30 
years ago, not much has changed. I remember as someone growing up 
during the oil embargoes and what we were experiencing in the late 
1970s and a real concern at the time about our dependence, 
overdependence, dangerous dependence on foreign sources of energy. At 
that time it was 55, 60 percent. Here we are 30 years later and we are 
more than ever dependent on foreign sources of energy. Mr. President, 
60 to 65 percent of our petroleum comes from outside the United 
States. We have very little control over the supply. The only way we 
fix that, the only way we can impact energy costs in this country in a 
meaningful way is to increase supply.

  We can talk a lot about a lot of issues with regard to this problem, 
this challenge we face as a country. There are some things we can do to 
impact the demand side, too, and we did that in the Energy bill last 
year. We increased for the first time in a very long time fuel economy 
standards so now automobiles are going to be built to standards that 
will require more miles per gallon than they currently get. That will 
help control, to some degree, the demand side. Obviously, I think 
individual consumers in this country, drivers in this country, are 
going to begin to take steps to reduce the amount of fuel they consume 
because it is impacting so adversely their pocketbooks on a daily 
basis.
  But there is not anything we can do totally on the demand side to get 
us out of this mess we are in. We have to do some things to impact 
supply. I can't help but think that if we had taken some of these steps 
years ago, back in 1995 or thereabouts when President Clinton vetoed 
legislation that would have allowed oil exploration on the North Slope 
of Alaska--at the time it was argued, oh, it will take 5 to 10 years 
for us to develop this resource and when we do, it will not be that 
much anyway. It is only 1 million or 1\1/2\ million barrels a day, and 
that is not that significant in the overall scheme of things. Here we 
are 10 years

[[Page S3487]]

later. If we had done that then, this would be fully developed, we 
would have the barrels of oil on a daily basis, the daily equivalent of 
what we get from Saudi Arabia, available to meet our demand in this 
country.
  It has probably been, since that time, half a dozen times we voted on 
that. In the House of Representatives, I don't know how many votes we 
had over there that would have allowed authorized exploration for oil 
on the North Slope of Alaska. We have had that vote in the Senate, 
since I have been here, on at least one occasion, maybe two times, 
where we were a couple votes short of reaching that magic 60-vote 
threshold that would allow us to move forward and explore some of these 
opportunities that we have to grow our supply, our domestic supply of 
energy.
  Because he had listened to this debate for some time--I have been in 
the Congress, now, for the better part of 10 years and always was 
interested when the debate would come to the floor of the House or the 
Senate and you would hear both sides come to the floor and make their 
arguments--I actually went up to Alaska and visited the section 1002 
area where it is proposed we develop this oil resource. We landed in 
Barrow, AK, in February, a couple years ago. It was 38 below. We 
visited a couple of the existing sites at Prudhoe Bay and then we went 
over to section 1002, which is the vast area we are talking about for 
development. What struck me is we are talking about a 2,000-acre 
footprint that would be used to access the oil below the surface, and 
with modern technology, you can actually get to those reserves below 
the surface with horizontal or directional drilling, with a minimal 
footprint on the surface, and it would be done during certain parts of 
the year where it wouldn't impact wildlife or anything.
  Incidentally, there were caribou everywhere. Anybody who is worried 
about the caribou on the North Slope of Alaska, they have nothing to 
worry about because, if anything, it has been increased since the 
activity that has taken place up there.
  But this particular area is a very isolated, remote area on the North 
Slope of Alaska. The estimates run from somewhere between 6 billion and 
16 billion barrels of oil beneath the surface or, as I said, the daily 
equivalent of about 1.5 million barrels a day, which is comparable to 
what we get from Saudi Arabia.
  To put it in perspective, a 2,000-acre footprint, for those who come 
from my part of the country who have an agricultural background, that 
is the equivalent of three sections of farm ground. That in an area of 
some 19.2 million acres in what they call ANWR, this refuge area. But 
if you look at the State of Alaska in its totality, Alaska, believe it 
or not, is 7.5 times the size of the State of South Dakota. You could 
put South Dakota geographically into Alaska 7.5 times. That is how vast 
this area is up there. It is part of our country, part of an area that 
has enormous resources below the surface that could be very meaningful 
in terms of addressing America's energy needs.
  When you visit that area, you cannot help but be struck with, No. 1, 
how supportive the governmental leadership is in that area--the 
Governor, the State legislature, in many respects most of the local 
citizens. There are always those who are opposed to this type of 
development. We heard from them as well. But overwhelmingly, the 
majority of people in that area want to see this development.
  Here we are again facing a crisis as we head into the summer driving 
season, travel season, vacation season. Families are looking, making 
plans. In my State of South Dakota, farmers are getting into the field, 
and they are having to deal with the input costs associated with high 
fuel costs, diesel costs. This is an economic issue that affects 
literally every American but particularly those middle-income Americans 
and those who this summer are looking at making plans to travel. They 
are going to be facing $3.50 gasoline, perhaps higher than that. Who 
knows how high that is going to go?

  My point very simply is we should have been taking these steps many 
years ago. We are now paying a price for inaction on the part of this 
Congress when it comes to the things we can do to add to supply in this 
country, to make sure we are taking full advantage of the domestic 
resources we have right here at home so we do not have to continue to 
allow other countries around the world to hold us over a barrel when it 
comes to our energy needs.
  The other thing we ought to have been doing--again this is something 
that is long overdue--is developing more refinery capacity. We are 
pretty much maxed out. We have not built a new refinery since 1976. 
They will tell you they have added or expanded existing refineries, and 
all that is true, but at the end of the day we have not done very much 
in terms of addressing the refinery shortage we have in this country 
either. So when it comes to raw resources such as the oil, petroleum 
resources below the surface on the North Slope of Alaska, when it comes 
to the ability to refine that into gasoline, we have some deficiencies 
that are of our own making. I regret the fact that we were not able to 
find the votes in this body to do these types of things many years ago, 
when today it would make a big difference in the challenge we face.
  The other issue, the other point I will make--because I think it gets 
back at this issue of how doing some of these things, although at the 
time they may have seemed to be not that substantial, could make a 
difference at the margin--is what has happened with renewable energy in 
this country. We are now generating about 7.5, almost 8 billion gallons 
of renewable fuel or ethanol in America today. One would think perhaps, 
when you use 140 billion gallons of gasoline on an annual basis, that 
that is not that big of a dent. But there was a study done by Merrill 
Lynch, it was reported in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back, 
that were it not for ethanol, the price per barrel of oil and the price 
per gallon of gasoline would actually be 15 percent higher than it is 
today. So even though it is 7.5 billion gallons out of a 140-billion-
gallon annual demand for gasoline, it is affecting the price because it 
is impacting supply in a positive way.
  In the same way, if we had opened the North Slope of Alaska when we 
had an opportunity to do so, we would have that 1\1/2\ million barrels 
a day coming into this country, which also would significantly impact 
the supply in a way that would begin to bring down prices. The only way 
we are going to bring downward pressure on prices is to increase 
supply. That is why I have been such a big advocate for renewable 
energy.
  We are at 7.5 billion gallons today. The Energy bill that passed last 
year calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by the year 2022. I 
think we can reach that. We are not going to reach it with corn-based 
ethanol. We have to diversify the production of ethanol in this country 
with other forms of biomass, whether that is by woodchips out of our 
forests, whether it is by switchgrass, which we have an abundance of on 
the prairies of South Dakota--but there are a lot of opportunities for 
what we call the next generation, for cellulosics, to meet the demands 
for energy in this country. I think we should be moving full steam 
ahead when it comes to support for renewables so we can lessen the 
demand on foreign energy and we can become more energy efficient here 
at home and develop the supplies of fuel we have.
  That being said, even if we get to 36 billion gallons of renewable 
fuels, we still will be way short of what we need. We are going to need 
a mix of fuels. We are going to rely on some of those traditional 
sources of fuel such as petroleum. Coal-to-liquid holds great promise 
in terms of being able to be used as a fuel, and coal is something we 
have in infinite amounts. We ought to be developing these types of 
resources. I think we also ought to be allowing States that want to, 
particularly some States in the upper Midwest, where ethanol is 
produced, to go to higher blends. We are at 10 percent ethanol today. 
There are States I think would like to go to higher blends. We ought to 
allow them, particularly when the studies are concluded by the 
Department of Energy and the EPA, which are determining the impact on 
drivability, materials compatibility, emissions--all those sorts of 
things. When they come back, which I believe they will, and 
conclusively determine that going to higher blends would not in any way 
adversely impact any of those metrics I mentioned, we ought to be 
moving to higher blends of ethanol because I think that also will help 
take pressure off oil prices as we continue to use more and more 
renewable energy.

[[Page S3488]]

  These are all parts of a solution. We need supply. But we have not 
taken the necessary steps to add to supply. If not now, I don't know 
when. When we get prices such as we are seeing, and the impact that is 
having on transportation industries such as aviation, such as trucking, 
such as agriculture, these are impacts on our economy that are only 
going to bring great economic strain to many industries and a loss of 
jobs.
  We can do something about it. We ought to be doing something about 
it. We need to now authorize, even though we have had many 
opportunities to do it in the past--we ought to do it on the North 
Slope of Alaska and offshore and other places where we have these 
reserves. We ought to allow refineries to be built. We tried to get 
legislation through that would allow refineries to be built on BRAC 
bases; in other words, bases that were closed through the BRAC process, 
and it was blocked by the Democrats on the Environment and Public Works 
Committee.
  Even when it came to the renewable fuel standard last year, that 
passed through the Senate and House and ultimately was signed into law, 
there is a deficiency there as well which has come to light now and a 
change that was made at the very 11th hour by the Speaker of the House 
that prevents biomass, residual types of biomass such as slash piles 
that are generated in our national forests, to be used to make 
cellulosic ethanol.
  That makes absolutely no sense. We have waste products in our forests 
that add to fuel loads that create fire hazards. All we are simply 
saying is these types of products could be used to make next-generation 
biofuels and help grow our supply of renewable energy, and that was 
stripped out, at the 11th hour, by the House in the conference.
  That is very unfortunate because it is steps such as that, it is 
steps such as blocking legislation that would allow for expedited 
permitting of refineries on BRAC bases, it is things such as blocking a 
vote on opening the North Slope of Alaska to oil exploration--those are 
the types of things that are stopping us. Those are the types of steps 
and maneuvers in the Senate and the House that are stopping us from 
adding to the supply of energy so we can do something about it, so we 
can impact, in a meaningful and positive way, the high prices that are 
affecting consumers across this country.
  I wish to make one observation as well with regard to renewable 
energy because ethanol has come under a lot of criticism of late, much 
of it I think inspired by opponents of ethanol, such as oil companies. 
People are talking about the high cost of food, and food prices have 
gone up in this country. But if you think about it, the amount of corn 
that goes into a box of corn flakes, for example, it is about a nickel. 
If you think about what impacts the cost of the things we buy at the 
grocery store, transportation has a profound impact on the cost because 
you have transportation, you have packaging, processing--all those 
things which are very energy intensive. So when you have high energy 
prices, high fuel prices such as we are facing today, that has more to 
do with the costs of food than the cost for a bushel of corn is ever 
going to have, when it comes to corn flakes or when it comes to popcorn 
or many of the other things that are being mentioned now by some of 
these groups opposing ethanol.
  I also would point out what I mentioned earlier and that is that were 
it not for ethanol--this again was reported upon by the Wall Street 
Journal a few weeks back, a study done by Merrill Lynch--oil prices, 
per-barrel oil prices and per-gallon gasoline prices would be about 15 
percent higher. Couple that with the fact that a high commodity price 
means the Federal taxpayers under our farm programs are not making 
payments to producers to the tune of a savings of about $8 billion last 
year, according to the USDA, and there are lots of impacts that are not 
being mentioned by those who are specifically singling out ethanol and 
criticizing ethanol for the increase and runup in food costs.
  Add to that or couple that with this piece of data that comes out of 
the USDA, that $8 billion in savings in taxpayer payments would be made 
under farm programs that were not made, that didn't go out this last 
year because of high product prices. That is a substantial savings to 
the taxpayers of this country. Again, couple that with the fact that 
ethanol has contributed 15 percent reduction in the overall costs of 
fuel in this country, ethanol is having the impact we hoped it would by 
increasing supply and taking pressure off the price at the pump in this 
country.
  High fuel costs, high food costs, all these things are impacting 
consumers across this country. We cannot solve that problem. We cannot 
solve the problem of the airlines until we do something to develop our 
domestic resources right here at home.
  We have some supplies, some reserves underground even in places that 
previously had not been contemplated as a source of energy, in places 
such as the Dakotas where we are now finding there are some reserves 
down there, that with prices being what they are may be economically 
recoverable. We should be doing everything we can to develop domestic 
resources, whether it is on the North Slope of Alaska, whether it is 
offshore, whether it is in the Dakotas, in the form of oil below the 
surface, or corn that grows above the surface that is renewable that we 
can use every single year. We need to be developing resources right 
here at home that will lessen our dependence upon foreign sources of 
energy and do something to take the pressure off these high gas prices 
we are seeing today that are affecting every single American.
  I hope we will pass a comprehensive energy bill, one that includes 
increasing our supply, one that finally, once and for all, will allow 
us to get to that 6 to 16 billion barrels of oil beneath the surface on 
the North Slope of Alaska, which is widely supported by the political 
leadership in Alaska, the local citizenry there, that increases the 
amount of renewable energy we use in this country by allowing States 
that choose to increase and go to higher blends, perhaps to 20 percent 
or 30 percent ethanol. These are all things we could and should be 
doing today--allowing refineries to be built on bases that have been 
closed, and allowing for expedited permitting when it comes to 
constructing those refineries. These are all things that ought to be 
part of this energy solution. I think people are going to hold this 
Congress accountable if we do not take steps in that direction. My hope 
would be that before we move out of here before the next break--we have 
got a break coming up in a couple of weeks--we will take some action 
that will do something meaningful to lower energy prices for people in 
this country, increase our supply to build new refineries, to support 
the increased use of renewables. Those are all things that will happen 
and provide solutions and meaningful relief to the hard-working people 
in this country who are now faced with much higher gasoline prices.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Menendez). The Senator from North Dakota.


                                 Energy

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I know a couple of my colleagues will be 
coming to the floor, specifically Senator Cantwell will be coming to 
the floor, to speak about some energy issues in a moment. When she 
does, I will relinquish the floor.
  I wanted to make a couple of comments. I listened with interest to my 
colleague from South Dakota making comments about the energy situation. 
We agree on much of what he has said and disagree on perhaps some 
amount of it. But renewable fuels, ethanol, providing renewable energy, 
all of that is very important.
  The area where we would perhaps not agree is ANWR, which in my 
judgment ought to be a last resort rather than a first resort. But I 
might say to my colleague from South Dakota that particularly with 
respect to the Outer Continental Shelf, if you measure where oil 
exists, the best resources and reserves of oil and gas on the Outer 
Continental Shelf first are in the Gulf of Mexico; second, off 
California; third, off Alaska.
  One of the things we have recently done on a bipartisan basis in this 
Congress was to pass something called Lease 181, which opened up a 
portion of the Gulf of Mexico for development of oil and gas. I was one 
of the four Senators who led the effort on that. I was pleased to do 
that because we are now

[[Page S3489]]

producing and are going to be producing more oil and more natural gas 
from one of the most productive areas in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. So 
production is certainly one of the areas we ought to be concerned 
about, as the Senator indicated. Production, conservation, efficiency, 
and renewables, all of these are important elements of an energy 
policy.
  No one has ever accused this Congress of speeding. I understand that. 
This system is not established to be necessarily efficient. It has 
checks and balances, which makes it very hard to get things done. But 
there is an urgency at this point, an urgency for families, for 
farmers, for truckers, yes, for businesses and airlines with respect to 
what is happening with the price of gasoline.

  There are a lot of reasons for all of this, and I am not here to try 
to ascribe blame, I am here to say: Let's fix some of these things. I 
am going to offer an amendment, by the way, to the FAA reauthorization 
bill, that deals with something that as of today I note that 67 Members 
of the Senate have agreed to.
  Some while ago, I introduced the notion of prohibiting the further 
movement of oil underground into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I 
have introduced legislation on that matter. Long ago I introduced it, 
had discussions with the Energy Committee about it. I had 51 Senators 
sign a letter to the President to say: Stop putting oil underground 
when the price of oil is $115, $120 a barrel. Stop taking oil out of 
supply and putting it underground into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. 
It is already 97 percent full. Why would we take oil out of supply to 
put upward pressure on prices, on both oil and gasoline, at a time when 
oil is at a record high? That makes no sense. Let us use at least some 
reservoir of common sense. Fifty-one Members of the Senate signed my 
legislation, signed the letter to the President in support of my 
legislation.
  Today, 16 members of the minority signed a letter to the President. 
They have also introduced legislation. So 51 and 16, 67 members agreed, 
that includes the person who spoke on the floor today. Senator McCain 
has called for the identical policy. That is 67. That is veto proof. If 
67 Members of this Senate say to this President and this 
administration: Stop sticking oil under the ground, nearly 70,000 
barrels of sweet light crude every day--that is the most valuable 
subset of oil. We have had testimony before the Energy Committee that 
suggests it has put as much as a 10-percent increase on the price of a 
barrel of oil or a gallon of gasoline. And while families and farmers 
and truckers and airlines and all of these businesses are trying to 
figure out how on Earth do we pay this fuel bill, and while we see the 
damage and the dislocation of this country's economy because of it, 
this administration merrily goes along sticking oil underground. It is 
unbelievable. At the very least you ought to expect some common sense 
here.
  Now, what has gotten us into this mess? Well, let me describe what is 
happening with Saudi Arabia. And if ever we should wonder about the 
danger of being overly dependent on oil from off this country's shores, 
this is the chart that shows why.
  The Saudis, who have the largest reserve of oil in the world by far, 
have reduced their production by 800,000 barrels a day since 2005. They 
have reduced production by 800,000 barrels a day. That is part of the 
problem. So we sit here in the United States with a prodigious need for 
energy to make this economy work. And, by the way, as an aside, I have 
said before: We stick straws in this planet and suck oil out of the 
planet. We suck out 86 million barrels of oil a day. One-fourth of it 
is required here in the United States of America. We use one-fourth of 
everything that is produced every day in this world, on this planet. 
One-fourth of that oil is used here in the United States. We have an 
enormous appetite. So we need to conserve; we need more efficiency in 
the use of energy. We have done some things in that area. The CAFE 
standards increased fuel efficiency by 10 miles per gallon over 10 
years. We have done some things in a range of these areas, but we are 
far too dependent on foreign sources of oil. When the Saudis decide 
they are going to cut back oil production by 800,000 barrels a day, and 
they say to us: Oh, by the way, with our strategic relationship, we 
want you to sell us precision munitions, it seems to me we ought to not 
be arming to the teeth the Middle East.
  But aside from that, strategic partnerships run both ways. You cut 
your oil production by 800,000 barrels over 2 years; and by the way, we 
would like some strategic weapons for our strategic need in the 
region--it does not seem to me that is the way a partnership should 
work.
  But let me describe with a couple of charts what is happening with 
this strategic reserve. Here we see that oil prices have nearly doubled 
in 1 year. There is no natural reason for that. The supply-demand 
relationship in the marketplace does not justify this. The marketplace 
simply is not working.
  We have these people who shake the cymbals and worship at the altar 
of the marketplace. By the marketplace, that is the greatest allocation 
of goods and services known to mankind. Well, I believe it is a great 
allocator of goods and services. I used to teach economics in college 
briefly, and I understand the marketplace. But the marketplace needs a 
referee from time to time because sometimes the marketplace does not 
work; the arteries get clogged, it does not work.
  So here is what has happened in a year. Oil prices nearly doubled in 
a year. Now, my colleagues have used quotes, and I have used many 
quotes. I am going to use one by Mr. Gheit, because Mr. Gheit said it 
all. He said: There is no shortage of oil.
  Who is Mr. Gheit? He has worked for 30 years for Oppenheimer and 
Company, the top energy analyst for Oppenheimer. He said:

       There is no shortage of oil. I am absolutely convinced that 
     oil prices shouldn't be a dime above $55 a barrel.

  Oil speculators, including the largest financial institutions in the 
world--he said:

       I call it the world's largest gambling hall. It is open 24/
     7. Unfortunately it is totally unregulated. This is like a 
     highway with no cops and no speed limit and everybody is 
     going 120 miles per hour.

  What is he talking about? He is talking about hedge funds neck deep 
in the futures market. He is talking about investment banks neck deep 
in the futures market. Is this because hedge funds and investment banks 
want to wallow in oil? Do they want to bathe in oil? Do they want to 
take it home and store it in their garage? They do not want to see oil. 
They want to speculate and make money.

  They have made a lot of money. People who never had it are buying 
things from people who never will get it. So they are making money on 
both sides of the transaction.
  Now, what does that do when you have this kind of unbelievable 
speculation? It causes the runup of prices in a very dramatic way. 
There is a trader named Andrew Hall. I would not know him from a cord 
of wood; never met him, never will, I suppose. He earned $250 million 
on the commodity market over the past 5 years, one-quarter of a billion 
dollars. He was betting. All of this is betting. He is betting long 
term, short term. He is not somebody who takes oil as a commodity; he 
just bets.
  There are a couple of things we ought to do. I will be very brief. 
One, in order to be engaged in the futures market, as I have said 
before, if you want to speculate in the commodities future market for 
oil, for example, you only require 5 to 7 percent down; only 5 to 7 
percent margin. You can control $100,000 worth of oil with $5,000 to 
$7,000 of your own money.
  If you wanted to wager, that is a good way to do it, I suppose. If 
you want to do it in the stock market, to do this on margin, it takes 
50 percent to buy in the stock market. But if you go to the commodities 
market, you can speculate to your little heart's content with 5 to 7 
percent. That makes no sense. It ought to be 25 percent, in my 
judgment, or perhaps if you want to buy oil futures, you ought to take 
possession of the oil.
  But one way or another, when you have a market that is not working, 
and you have speculation running out of control, I think there is an 
obligation on the part of this Congress to address that. Because that 
speculation is driving up the price of oil, and driving the price of 
gasoline well up beyond where the fundamentals would suggest. It 
injures the American drivers, consumers,

[[Page S3490]]

business, and it injures this country's economy.
  The second point I indicated I was going to make is on the Strategic 
Petroleum Reserve. This chart shows what the Strategic Petroleum 
Reserve looks like. These are holes in the ground, and we shove oil 
down those holes. We save it for a rainy day; it's 97 percent filled at 
this point. We are putting just under 70,000 barrels a day every day 
underground right now.
  Sixty-seven Members of the Senate as of today have expressed 
themselves publicly. They think it is the wrong thing to do. They think 
this administration is making a mistake and they ought to stop it. Now, 
why do people say that? Because they know if we stop taking that 70,000 
barrels of sweet light crude and sticking it underground, it will be 
part of the inventory out there, and they know that would put downward 
pressure on gas prices and downward pressure on oil prices. That is why 
67 people have come to this conclusion.
  The question is: What do we do to try to stop this? Well, when you 
put oil underground, you drive up to the gas station, you see the 
effects of this kind of policy. The question is: What do we do to put 
some downward pressure on prices? Stop filling the Strategic Petroleum 
Reserve and stop it now.
  There is a bill on the floor of the Senate, the FAA reauthorization 
bill. I am part of the committee that has produced this bill. We need 
to modernize the system for aviation in this country. It is desperately 
in need of modernization. It is going to cost some money to do that, 
but we do not have much choice. We have had, I think, four airlines 
declare bankruptcy in the last month and a half.
  A substantial part of it, announced by every one of those airlines, 
had to do with the price of jet fuel.
  I am going to offer, as an amendment on this bill, legislation that 
would call a halt to filling the Strategic Reserve. To stop taking oil 
and sticking it underground, and put some downward pressure on jet fuel 
prices, downward pressure on gasoline prices. Some say this doesn't fit 
on this bill. It does. Fuel prices are why three or four airlines have 
gone bankrupt in the last month and a half.
  I will be over here tomorrow speaking about this topic because I 
believe strongly that we should do something about this issue.
  My colleague Senator Byrd used to talk about Aesop's fly. He 
described the fable Aesop's fly who was sitting on the axle of a 
chariot who would observe: My, what dust I do raise. There are some 
here in the Congress who have that notion, that if you just make a 
little bit of noise and have a little bit of activity, you can claim a 
lot of success. The fact is, that is not what the American people want 
this time. They want this Congress to understand the urgency, 
understand the problem, understand what it is doing to this country's 
families, and do something about it. When you have speculation that 
runs out of control, this Congress has a responsibility to do 
something. We can't have someone else do it, we can't wait for somebody 
else. It won't get done. If we don't do it, it won't happen.
  These are two steps I believe we ought to take: No. 1, increase the 
margin requirement and stop the speculation in the futures market to 
begin to put downward pressure on prices; No. 2, stop putting oil 
underground when prices are at a record high and put downward pressure 
on prices. If we did both of those things, I am convinced we would 
bring oil and gas prices back down and we would provide some relief to 
the American driver and to the American economy.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Ms. CANTWELL. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Ms. CANTWELL. I come to the floor this evening to talk about the 
energy crisis, the price of oil, and how consumers are seeing the 
impacts of high oil prices in their everyday lives. The high price of 
oil is impacting businesses and many consumers can't afford to take 
family vacations and trips, dragging down our economy over all, and 
dragging us further into an economic downturn.
  What I have heard today on the Senate floor from many of my 
colleagues is accusations and claims about what is going on and what 
might have transpired on various issues that might have caused the high 
price of gasoline and certainly the price of crude oil, which is now 
well over $100 a barrel. I think it is important to think about what 
Congress has already done and to make sure we are telling consumers 
what needs to be accomplished to solve the problem.
  What we are hearing from analysts on Wall Street is that this issue 
is going to continue to exacerbate, and that oil prices will continue 
to rise. When we think about oil futures all the way out to 2015, still 
being over $100 a barrel, and oil futures impacting the physical price, 
it raises a lot of concerns about how the economy can sustain such a 
high price of fuel.
  Let's start with some basics about supply and demand because many of 
my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have talked about the fact 
that they think oil supply hasn't been there, that growth in the 
numbers of people in India, China, other countries, is exacerbating the 
problem.
  While we have seen growth in demand from other countries, this 
chart--starting in 1980, going all the way to 2006, and showing some 
numbers until 2008; the orange line is demand, and the yellow line is 
supply--except for some anomalies here, shows that supply and demand 
have kept pace. So anybody who wants to say this is all about supply 
and demand hasn't looked at a chart such as this showing that these 
lines pretty much track each other. What it tells us is that we have to 
look at other fundamental things that are happening in the marketplace 
and not just make accusations about what is going on.
  In fact, if you want to look at the high price of gasoline, you can't 
say it is just an increase in demand. During the summer season, motor 
gasoline consumption in the United States is actually projected to 
decline by four-tenths of a percent, and it is projected to decline by 
three-tenths for the whole year. We are actually seeing a decline in 
demand. Obviously, that is not a surprise. Given the high price of 
fuel, people are not able to afford to continue their normal habits. 
But the issue isn't that the price is being driven up simply because 
there is this increase in demand. The high price of gasoline also isn't 
about the fact that there are low inventories. Some people have wanted 
to say this issue is about low inventories. When you look at what the 
industry says, here is an oil analyst who basically says that gasoline 
inventories are higher than the historical average at this time of the 
year. So there is really no need to worry about tight supply. Here is 
an oil analyst saying that.
  It points, again, to other questions about what is going on. Some 
people have said: Let's blame it on renewables. Many Democrats have 
been big supporters of renewable energy, big supporters of getting 
alternatives into the marketplace, because we believe if you get 
alternative fuel into the marketplace, it will lower the demand on 
normal fossil fuel and create some competitive advantages. I know there 
are some people--a Governor--basically saying: You ought to repeal the 
whole RFS. You ought to get rid of this issue as it relates to having a 
renewable fuels standard. Here is the Wall Street Journal report from 
Merrill Lynch saying that without biofuels, the price would be even 
higher, and that basically oil and gasoline prices would be 15 percent 
higher if biofuels weren't helping to increase the output. So it is 
wrong to say that somehow our focus on renewable fuels has exacerbated 
the situation when, in fact, it has done nothing but help the 
situation. In fact, I love that this Texas A&M study basically 
found that ethanol has increased in excess of what our renewable fuels 
standard was, indicating that relaxing the standard would not cause a 
contraction in the industry, nor would it cause a reduction in the 
price of corn.

  The issue today is where do we go for solutions. Part of the issue is 
that many of my colleagues are saying it is all about more supply of 
fossil fuel for the United States. We have had this debate so many 
times in the Senate. We

[[Page S3491]]

have had a debate about whether the United States, with 3 percent of 
the world's oil reserve, really is going to make a dent in increasing 
supply and giving consumers a chance to get off fossil fuels. We are 
going to have a big debate about global warming and its impact and 
whether we should even keep our focus on fossil fuel or accelerate 
getting off of it.
  Many times today, even down at the Rose Garden, we hear the word 
``ANWR'' again, and how ANWR was the secret recipe for lowering gas 
prices in America. I obviously don't support opening up drilling in the 
Arctic Wildlife Refuge because it is a wildlife refuge. But I certainly 
don't support it when even our own Energy Information Administration 
has said that drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge would only reduce 
gasoline prices by a penny per gallon and only 20 years after we got to 
peak production. So at a penny per gallon, if people use 400 to 500 
gallons of fuel, we are talking about a few dollars of savings there 
over many, many months. So the notion that ANWR would be some way of 
solving our problems just isn't true.
  I know a lot of people have talked about refinery capacity, and I 
think you need to talk to the oil companies about refinery capacity and 
why they have not expanded. I know my colleague Senator Boxer has been 
out here many times talking about how she had to stop consolidation in 
her State because they didn't want to keep a refinery open. But I know 
this: We know it is not environmental regulation. In fact, according to 
this CEO of an oil company:

       We are not aware of any environmental regulations that 
     would prevent us from expanding our refinery capacity or 
     siting a new refinery.

  So we know it is not about environmental regulations. That is not 
what is stopping them either.
  Some people have said: Don't take the tax incentives away from the 
oil industry; don't do that because somehow that is what is keeping the 
industry afloat. The industry is making record profits. They are making 
so much profit they don't even know what to do with the profit. They 
are buying back their own stock.
  We know this: We know the President of the United States, George W. 
Bush, said:

       With $55 oil, we don't need incentives for oil and gas 
     companies to explore.

  It is way above $55 a barrel. So I take him at his word that we don't 
need incentives to continue to explore at that level.
  Let's talk about what is the issue. Let's talk about what is the 
problem we need to solve, for which we need to be responsible to 
consumers, to businesses, to the economy, and to make sure we continue 
to deal with this threatening crisis.
  I know one oil analyst who looked at these markets. And maybe the man 
on the street, if you ask him, he thinks something is going on in the 
oil market. He doesn't think it is about supply and demand. He didn't 
happen to see that first chart I put up, but he knows something is 
going on because he sees the irregularity of prices. But this analyst 
said: Unless the U.S. Government steps in to rein in speculators' power 
in the market, prices will just keep going up. Basically he is saying 
that speculators have too much power in the market right now, and 
unless the Government does its job, the prices are going to keep going 
up. So it is time for us to act. It is time for us to get smart about 
this.

  It reminds me of the debate we had when the Enron crisis hit the 
electricity markets. It probably took well into 2001, when many people 
said: Do you know what, this is all about environmental regulation, or, 
this is about not enough refineries, and it is about the fact that 
there is a supply shortage. They came up with all these things.
  So as 2002 rolled around and as more and more investigation was done, 
we found out that, no, it was actually manipulative schemes by various 
individuals within a very large organization--actually several 
organizations--that purposely manipulated the electricity markets. They 
did this so they could short supply and drive up the price.
  Now, Congress acted in 2005. We said--after we found out all the 
facts, we heard all the terms: Death Star, Get Shorty, all the various 
schemes that had been manipulated--we kept thinking: How could this 
happen when we had a Federal Power Act that said, on the wholesale rate 
of electricity and natural gas, you have to have just and reasonable 
pricing. We thought that is a clear enough message for people. But, in 
fact, it was not. It was not a clear enough message. It cost my State 
billions. It cost California's economy billions. So what did we do? 
Congress made it illegal to use manipulative devices or contrivances in 
the electricity or natural gas physical markets, and we greatly 
increased the penalties for market transparency violations.
  Now, why did we go to the extent of doing this? We could not believe 
that such activities were in some way a gray area and that somehow 
people were still confused post-Enron that this kind of activity was 
OK. Some people said: Well, you already have the electricity and 
natural gas markets under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. 
What else do you need?
  But I was very proud that Congress passed this legislation. Since 
that law has been on the books, since 2005, the Federal Energy 
Regulatory Commission, as it relates to electricity and natural gas 
markets, has been aggressive about pursuing this power and using it.
  What have been the results? Well, the result has been making market 
manipulation illegal when it comes to oil and natural gas, so that they 
have had 64 investigations, 14 settlements, $48 million in civil 
penalties, two ongoing market manipulation cases that could net over 
$450 million in civil penalties, and a dramatic increase in self-
reporting and self-policing. It is like one of my staffers said: If you 
want people to straighten up, let them know there is going to be a cop 
on the beat. Let them know there is going to be someone investigating 
these activities and we are not going to tolerate it, and people will 
start obeying the law. So we did that.
  In 2007, we decided that if this kind of pervasive activity was still 
continuing in the natural gas and electricity markets--if that was 
still happening--maybe there was some correlation here with what was 
happening in the oil markets, because clearly, after looking at all 
those charts we just went through about supply and demand, and 
everything else, we could not understand what was happening. We have 
had oil company executives tell us that the price of oil today should 
be at somewhere between $50 and $60 a barrel given where supply and 
demand is. Oil company executives are throwing up their arms saying: We 
don't know why the price of oil is well over $100 a barrel. So we, in 
the Energy bill in 2007, passed a law saying it is time to make the 
same laws we have for natural gas and electricity apply to oil markets. 
We said that any person who uses, directly or indirectly, ``any 
manipulative or deceptive device or contrivance'' in connection with 
the wholesale purchase of crude oil or petroleum distillates--that that 
was illegal and that Congress made violations subject to penalties of 
up to $1 million a day. That is $1 million a day because we believe, if 
you are doing these kinds of activities, every day that you have 
engaged in those activities you should pay a fine for that.
  Now, where are we today with this authority? Because some people say: 
Well, you passed a law. Is it working? This law does not really go into 
effect until the Federal Trade Commission adopts rules and puts them 
into action. That is what we are waiting for now. My colleagues on the 
Commerce Committee have urged the FTC to hurry about this task, that it 
is so important to our economy and to consumers to hurry about this 
task. I know Senator Reid has encouraged them, Speaker Pelosi has 
encouraged them. So we are in the process now of hoping that the FTC 
will implement this rule and give proper notice but start the process 
because once the marketplace knows--just as they did in natural gas and 
electricity--that these kinds of activities will not be tolerated, we 
might be able to make a dent in what is happening with this excessive 
speculation in the energy markets.
  Well, let's look at what exactly the market manipulation behavior is 
that we are concerned about. We basically have said we are interested 
in whether companies have manipulated the supply, whether they have 
given false reporting, whether they have cornered

[[Page S3492]]

the market, and whether they have engaged in any kind of rogue trading. 
Those are the things we are concerned about.
  Well, let's talk about supply manipulation for a second because that 
is something for which people might say: Well, it is just about supply 
and demand, and how do you pass a law about supply and supply 
manipulation? Believe it or not, there are good Federal statutes on the 
books starting with a lot of case law and a lot of history. What we are 
saying is, we do not want any artificial influencing of supply in the 
energy markets. We do not want someone creating something that is not a 
normal part of business but is artificially used to create a shortage--
for example, diverting or exporting marginal supply in tight markets. 
That is, we know the market is tight on oil. You can go back to that 
chart on supply and demand. They pretty much track very closely. So it 
is a tight market. When you have an event like Katrina, it is even 
tighter.

  Our question is, Did somebody export supply outside the country just 
to create a shortage in the United States and drive up the price? Have 
we had hedge funds holding crude oil ships off the coast just so the 
price will go up for a few more days?
  That is the second point: holding supply deliveries temporarily to 
boost prices. We have people now who are major players in the oil 
market who really are not the end users of crude oil supply. They are 
just big financial movers in the marketplace. They are not taking the 
delivery of oil because they are out there delivering it to various 
jobbers or what have you. They are there for a financial investment.
  In fact, we want to know if some of these inventory management 
strategies that have basically reduced physical supply--and basically 
everybody just trades their reserves on paper, and everybody just 
trades the paper around, where that, in fact, does not have much 
transparency to it. So we do not know how much that creates that 
management system in and of itself. Where we used to have 30 days of 
crude oil supply, thereby, the market was not so tight. Now we have 
this paper inventory system. We do not know what that really means. We 
do not know how much supply is really in reserve. Is that being used to 
manipulate supply?
  Then, obviously, what we saw--I just think back to the Enron days 
when people said: Oh, no, no one would ever shut down a powerplant just 
to short supply. They would never do something like that. It must all 
be about the fact that really something was wrong. Well, we found out 
that there were purposeful shutdowns of various powerplants to short 
the market and to drive up the price. So we want to know if there are 
unnecessary and untimely ``maintenance'' shutdowns just to impact 
supply in the marketplace of oil.
  We also want to know whether there is false reporting because false 
reporting can lead to misleading or inaccurate statements that also can 
hinder the marketplace.
  Part of this legislation we passed in this bill is to say, in 2007, 
that if you gave false information, that was also subject to civil 
penalties of up to $1 million a day because part of this--the same in 
the Enron case--is it was very hard to understand these schemes. If it 
was not for videotapes that were put together, we would have never 
known exactly how these schemes would have worked just by looking at 
the books. So we want the Government to look at some of this 
information and if there are manipulative schemes. But if they provide 
false information, we believe that also should be a penalty.
  Now, we know that in one case of natural gas--El Paso Merchant 
Energy--they reported nonexistent trades to reporting firms while at 
the same time failing to maintain certain records. They basically 
created false information about the trades that were going on. The 
result was six traders were convicted for false reporting and 
attempting to manipulate the energy market.
  Now, the reason why this is so important to the subject we are 
debating today is that manipulation has happened in natural gas, and 
why this is so important now is because in the oil markets, and 
particularly in the oil futures market, we do not even have the same 
transparency in reporting requirements that we do with other 
commodities like natural gas. We have given them an exemption in the 
Enron loophole that was done in 2000 as part of the Commodity Exchange 
Act, so they do not have those reporting requirements. So we cannot 
even go and get some of this information to know that something like 
what was happening with El Paso Energy is transpiring in the oil 
markets, as it did in the natural gas markets.
  So it is one of the reasons why we want to close the Enron loophole 
and to say that the trading of energy futures, which definitely impacts 
the price of oil today--and we will get to that on another day out here 
on the floor, about how the energy futures price impacts oil today, we 
will get to that, but for today we just know that if you do not have 
reporting, then there is no way--whether it is the SEC or the CFTC or 
FERC or the FTC--no one has any ability to get access to the 
information.
  We also know that we want cornering the market to be illegal. 
Cornering the market would be exploiting the market power through 
excessive mergers like natural monopolies or blocking new entrants to 
basically corner the marketplace. We know this is something about which 
we have a great deal of concern. We know British Petroleum attempted to 
do this. Basically, they purchased excess propane in Texas, within the 
pipelines, to hold it from the market and then sell it high. We know 
they did that in trying to corner the market. The end result was that 
the Department of Justice and the CFTC ended up with a settlement case 
against them in the number of $303 million. So we know these things are 
happening in other energy markets, and we know they are a problem in 
the--potentially a problem--in the oil markets today.
  We also know rogue trading is potentially a problem as well.
  Mr. President, I am not going to take much more time on this issue as 
it relates to the high price of gasoline. I plan to continue to come 
out to the floor to talk about this issue about the need for the CFTC 
to promulgate this rule and get on about investigating the oil markets 
and to make sure consumers are protected.
  I talked about what I think the rule needs to do. It needs to 
prohibit the manipulation of supply and to have a strong statute and 
penalty for falsifying information. It has to have a prohibition on 
cornering the market.
  I believe that rogue trading is something else we are seeing in the 
marketplace. We need to have a prohibition on that. People might ask: 
What is that? It is employing manipulative trading schemes such as 
buying or selling large volumes of stock or futures contracts with the 
intention of influencing prices.
  You can imagine, if somebody has a large position in one of these 
energy supplies or stocks, that basically ends up impacting the 
marketplace. We actually found this with the Amaranth case, in the area 
of natural gas. Amaranth sold large volumes of what is called next 
month natural gas delivery in the last 30 minutes of the market. What 
they did is basically crashed the close of the market. By selling large 
amounts of futures contracts for delivery of natural gas at the close 
of the market they manipulated the price and benefitted their large 
positions in other financial derivatives, and that ended up impacting 
the physical price of natural gas. The good news is the FERC, because 
of the 2005 law we passed, was on the beat, doing its job. 
Unfortunately, consumers paid something akin to $9 billion in increased 
natural gas costs before the FERC could get this situation under 
control. Now they are in the enforcement phase of a $291 million civil 
penalty against Amaranth. We know these situations are happening with 
rogue trading.
  We know of another case that is similar to rogue trading and price 
manipulation, where Marathon Oil allegedly attempted to sell oil 
delivery contracts below the market prices in order to basically lower 
the market price, benefitting them as a net purchaser of foreign crude 
oil. So there ended up being an investigation by the CFTC, and today 
they are in a $1 million settlement with the CFTC on that issue.
  All these issues, I believe, need to be investigated in the oil 
markets. They need to have a strong statute passed by the CFTC, similar 
to in 2005 for electricity and natural gas, where we can

[[Page S3493]]

see the results of the investigation, we can see that a Federal agency 
is doing its job; we need to do the same thing with the oil market.
  In fact, there are five things I think we need to do that would help 
protect consumers from high prices of gasoline. Our economy and 
consumers cannot afford much more.
  We need to close the Enron loophole, in which that 2000 law said that 
online trading promulgated by Enron, they said, they don't have the 
same transparency, don't have to open their books or allow people to 
see what they are doing. We know for other commodities the Securities 
and Exchange Commission and CFTC look at those things to make sure 
there is not a manipulation in the marketplace. We cannot even get 
these because we gave them an exemption. That needs to be repealed. We 
need to require oversight of all oil futures markets. That is, as I 
said, the oil futures price affects the physical price of oil. If 
people are going to buy oil futures well into 2015 at over $100 a 
barrel, it is going to impact the physical price of oil today. If you 
can buy oil at over $116 in the oil futures, it is hard to believe that 
oil is going to drop much below that in the physical market. But these 
are markets--unlike, again, our commodities in the United States, on 
NYMEX or the mercantile exchange, such as corn or soybean futures, this 
is an exchange the United States doesn't have any regulatory impact on. 
We don't have the ability to look at those books, any enforcement 
mechanisms. We don't have the ability to protect consumers on that kind 
of speculation if there is manipulative activity going on.
  As I said, we need to get the CFTC to finish their work. This is so 
important that I think the Department of Justice should coordinate all 
these agencies because there are futures activities, there is a 
physical market, and there is the falsification of information. What 
happened with Enron is the Department of Justice created a task force, 
called the Enron Task Force. It coordinated these agencies and got to 
the bottom of what was happening with the electricity markets and the 
manipulation. I think the Department of Justice should create an Oil 
Market Fraud Task Force to do the same thing.
  Lastly, I know my colleagues will talk about this on the floor--to 
make price gouging a Federal crime. There are 28 States in our country 
that have the ability, in an emergency, to make a declaration in the 
event of a natural disaster, or huge anomalies in the market, and help 
stabilize the situation with executive power. I am willing to give that 
same executive power to the President of the United States. I hope he 
would use it.
  In conclusion, there is a lack of transparency in energy trading 
markets. We need to fix that. This is one of the CFTC Commissioners who 
said:

       I am generally concerned about a lack of transparency and 
     the need for greater oversight and enforcement of the 
     derivatives industry.

  He is basically talking about this offshore exchange, where we don't 
have the same kind of oversight that we do. In fact, I said earlier 
that we have more regulation of hamburger and the future of beef than 
we have of oil. I will tell you that oil is critically important to our 
economy, and it needs to have the same kind of transparency and 
oversight as other futures commodities.
  Last, I will reiterate that even on Wall Street, even the analysts 
who know what is going on in the marketplace, who know these prices are 
outrageous, not based on supply and demand, are saying:

       Unless the U.S. Government steps in to rein in speculators' 
     power in the market, prices will just keep going up.

  An energy analyst said that this month.
  It is clear the marketplace even thinks there is too much speculative 
power, and the answer is for us to do our jobs--for the FTC to do their 
job, to get the help of DOJ, and for us to make sure we are doing our 
job on oversight in giving consumers protection. But I think there are 
very few people in America who do not think these prices are out of 
control, that it is not normal market forces, it is not normal supply 
and demand, and if it keeps careening out of control, it is going to 
wreck our economy. It is certainly wrecking consumers' pocketbooks 
right now.
  I hope we will take action. I hope the Federal agencies will get on 
their feet and be aggressive about protecting consumers on this 
important issue. I know we will continue to talk about this on the 
floor as we continue to pass legislation that does protect America from 
these out-of-control gasoline prices.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, Senator Coburn has agreed to come to the 
floor. I have a couple unanimous consent requests. He wanted to be 
present when I made these.


                   Unanimous Consent Requests--S. 579

  Mr. President, every year, hundreds of thousands of women in America 
are diagnosed with breast cancer. Breast cancer will strike 
approximately one in eight American women in their lifetime, with a new 
case diagnosed every 2 minutes in America. This year alone, it is 
estimated that 250,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, and 
40,000 of them will die.
  We have made remarkable progress in breast cancer diagnosis and 
treatment, but we still do not know the cause of breast cancer. There 
are theories but no one really knows. Scientists have identified some 
risk factors. Those factors help explain fewer than 30 percent of the 
cases.
  This legislation that I am going to ask unanimous consent for in just 
a few minutes, the Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Act, would 
establish a national strategy to study the possible links between 
breast cancer and the environment and would authorize funding for such 
research.
  Eminent scientists believe the breast cancer that is being found, 
discovered in America, very likely is the result of something in the 
environment. Resulting discoveries could be critical to improving our 
knowledge of this complex illness which could lead to better prevention 
and treatment and even perhaps one day a cure.
  Although we first introduced this legislation in 2000, and despite 
strong bipartisan support--right now we have 68 Senators supporting 
this legislation and are cosponsors of it, Democrats and Republicans--
Congress has yet to act and send this bill to President Bush. Last 
session, the bill was reported out of the HELP Committee, but one of 
our colleagues prevented final Senate passage. This session we have 
worked in good faith to address any concerns that have been raised 
about this legislation. As a result, this act was once again reported 
out of the HELP Committee, and as I have indicated, it is sponsored by 
68 Senators.
  It is long past time for the Senate to take up and pass this broadly 
supported bipartisan legislation. Too many women and their families 
have waited too long for Congress to act. I tried recently, last week, 
to pass this legislation by unanimous consent, but one Senator objected 
to my request. In response to that objection, I then offered a time 
agreement that would allow for 2 hours of debate on this bill with two 
amendments on each side. I think this is a fair offer for legislation 
that over two-thirds of this body have cosponsored. This offer was 
rejected.
  I urge that we have this matter move forward. I urge my colleague to 
reconsider this offer and end the opposition to this matter--opposition 
to even debating this legislation which enjoys such broad bipartisan 
support. It is time to offer more than words of encouragement to those 
affected by breast cancer. Our wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and 
friends have waited long enough.
  I therefore ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the 
immediate consideration of Calendar No. 628, S. 579, the Breast Cancer 
and Environmental Research Act; that the committee-reported substitute 
be agreed to; the bill, as amended, be read three times and passed, and 
a motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; and that any statements 
be printed at the appropriate place in the Record as if given with no 
intervening action or debate.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized.

[[Page S3494]]

  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I will not take the time now to go into 
detail. I will wait until the Senator from Washington finishes her 
speech.
  I will say I have a personal involvement with this issue. My sister 
has breast cancer. My sister-in-law has breast cancer. My most 
cherished person in the world besides my wife and children and 
grandchildren died of breast cancer. She was a breast cancer nurse 
specialist. I understand the disease. We spend more on breast cancer 
research than any other cancer in this country today. We spend $100 
million on environmental causes related to breast cancer research.
  I don't object to us spending money on breast cancer research. I 
object to us making the decisions about what the scientists know we 
should do versus what the politicians want us to do. So I will spend 
some time after the Senator from Washington State speaks outlining in 
detail my opposition to putting one cancer ahead of the other 70, No. 
1; and one disease that--specifically, we are going to put one specific 
disease and one ideology of a specific disease ahead of all of the 
others, and I will outline that in detail.
  On the basis of that, I will object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I understand the objection, but I would hope 
everyone within the sound of my voice understands the lack of logic to 
the statement just made by my friend, the Senator from the State of 
Oklahoma. If he has problems with this legislation, why would he 
prevent the whole Senate from taking it up? Why wouldn't he come to the 
floor as legislators are supposed to do rather than some guerilla 
attack and not allowing this to come up, recognizing if I bring this to 
the floor, it takes time.
  Now, I don't understand why, if he has all of these great ideas as to 
what should or shouldn't be done. Let's bring this to the floor, offer 
an amendment, offer two amendments. Why stop this matter from being 
legislated?
  So I understand. I can't wave a medical degree, but I can wave the 
fact that this legislation is important to many people in America 
today, and this legislation gives them hope that something can be done 
to find a cause and hopefully a cure. If my friend is so certain of his 
position, he should be able to offer an amendment and prevail in that 
regard.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the 
consideration of Calendar No. 628, S. 527, the Breast Cancer Research 
Act that was just spoken about, at a time to be determined by me 
following consultation with the Republican leader, and that the bill be 
considered under the following limitations: that other than the 
committee-reported substitute, the only first-degree amendments be four 
amendments--two for each leader--that are relevant to the provisions of 
the underlying bill and substitute; that there be a time limit of 1 
hour for general debate on the bill and 1 hour on each amendment; with 
all time equally divided and controlled between the leaders or their 
designees; that upon the disposition of all amendments, the use or 
yielding back of all time, the substitute, as amended, if amended, be 
agreed to; the bill, as amended, be read a third time with no 
intervening action or debate; and the Senate proceed to a vote on 
passage of the bill, as amended.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized.
  Mr. COBURN. I would like to ask the majority leader a question. Are 
you aware of the thousands of studies that have already been 
published--
  Mr. REID. Of the what?
  Mr. COBURN. Are you aware of the thousands of studies that have 
already been written on this subject?
  Mr. REID. I say to my friend, I am not aware of the thousands of 
studies. I am aware of the need to move forward with this legislation. 
I would say to my friend, if, in fact, there are thousands--and I don't 
in any way doubt the word of my friend--then why should that be a basis 
for stopping us to legislate on this issue?
  We have 68 Senators who believe this legislation is important. If 
you, the Senator from Oklahoma, have a cause that this legislation is 
ill-founded, people are--I have changed my position on legislation 
before, and I can't understand why you would stand in the way of 
allowing this legislation to be legislated. That is what we do here. We 
are legislators.
  So, no, I am not familiar with the thousands of studies.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I appreciate the majority leader's 
response to my question. The reason is because the policy is wrong. We 
passed the NIH Reform Act just to eliminate this sort of issue because 
what we know is, out of the 2,037 diseases, we don't know which one to 
fund properly. We don't know which one to spend the most money on, but 
peer-reviewed science does. So what we have decided is, because we have 
a very effective lobbying group on this because it does impact hundreds 
of thousands of women, we are going to step right back in the middle of 
the NIH reform and say we didn't need it.
  So the policy of us directing spending on research when we don't have 
the knowledge base to know that is the right thing to do--and the 
researchers agree with this, that we don't have the knowledge--in the 
context of all of the other 2,037 diseases, I will object to moving 
forward on this because the policy is wrong. It is not about debating 
it. I am happy to debate it all you want. But the policy is wrong.
  Who says that the women who died of breast cancer this year are more 
important than the same number of people who died from lung cancer that 
is not related to smoking? Are we going to say that? Should we tell the 
NIH everything they should do, every amount of money, every disease we 
should decide, based on the effective lobbying of people who are 
absolutely affected--there is no question about that--but should we 
make that decision? The answer is no, we shouldn't. We should let the 
experts, not the Senators, not the Representatives, but the scientific 
experts make those decisions. We have given that charge to the NIH. 
That is what we ought to do. They would more sooner come to a cure and 
solve the problem than with us micromanaging the NIH.
  With that, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I first got interested in diseases of women 
a number of years ago when in my Las Vegas office three women came to 
see me. They didn't want to be there. They were embarrassed for being 
there. They had a condition. It is called interstitial fasciitis. I had 
never heard the words before, and it is still hard for me to say these 
words after all of these years. But I looked into this. The NIH and the 
scientific community and the country thought this was a psychosomatic 
disease; that this was something these women had in their head; that 
even though each of them described the pain the same--like slivers of 
glass being shoved up and down their bladder--it was all in their head.
  I had the good fortune of having a woman, who is an orthopedic 
surgeon, who had this same condition, and she said: This is not in my 
head, it is in my bladder, and something should be done to study this. 
We have begged the NIH to do it. We have had others that we have asked 
to do it, and they are not doing anything: You, Senator Reid, should 
have something done about this.
  And we did this. We established a registry. We did that by 
legislation. As a result of that, now almost 50 percent of the people 
who have that disease have medicine to take that takes away their 
symptoms, the pain. It is pretty good.
  Have we cured the disease? No, we haven't. But progress has been made 
because, as policymakers, that is what we do. We set policy. The NIH is 
a body of this legislature, this Congress, and we have an obligation 
and a right to direct them to do things. Now, they do good work. They 
do very good work. But there are other things that we think they should 
be doing.
  Who cares about this, my friend asks? Well, who is lobbying for this, 
he asks? Two hundred and fifty thousand women who are going to get the 
disease this year are the lobbyists. They don't come here, all of them, 
and 40,000 to 250,000 are going to die. Now, is every penny of this 
money that we want to appropriate going to hit the mark and do the 
right thing? Maybe not, but it is going to lead to some discoveries 
that

[[Page S3495]]

will help this disease and probably other diseases.
  So I say, I am disappointed and we are going to continue to work this 
issue. This issue is not going to go away. It is not only this Senator 
but 67 other Senators and others who will support this when and if we 
get this to the floor. So I appreciate the courtesy of my friend from 
Oklahoma. He is a gentleman. I disagree with him on occasion, but I 
appreciate his statement.


                  Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 5613

  Mr. REID. We have more than 50 million low-income people--about 1 out 
of 6 Americans--depend on Medicaid for their health care. These are the 
poorest of the poor.
  This administration has issued a series of regulations that will 
undermine the Medicaid safety net and create barriers for accessing 
care for the poorest of the poor.
  These regulations, touted by the administration as ``savings,'' would 
not lower health care costs.
  Instead States--already facing tough economic times, strained 
budgets, and increased demand for services such as Medicaid--will 
either have to raise revenues elsewhere or be forced to cut services to 
our Nation's most vulnerable at a time when they need help the most.
  Each regulation has different impact on individuals, providers, 
communities, and States. They include, among other things, detrimental 
provisions, such as limiting services for people with disabilities; 
preventing children from receiving health care during the schoolday; 
cutting payments to public hospitals and other safety net providers for 
such undertakings as emergency rooms, burn units, and trauma centers.
  The administration claims these regulations are necessary to fight 
fraud and waste in the Medicaid Program. But in a recent hearing on the 
Medicaid Program, the General Accounting Office testified it did not 
recommend the administration's proposed changes. They would not help.
  We are committed to ferreting out any fraud that may exist in the 
Medicaid Program. But regulations that harm our most vulnerable and 
place greater burden on fiscally strapped States are clearly not the 
way to accomplish this end.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the 
consideration of Calendar No. 719, H.R. 5613--which, I might add, 
passed the House by a huge vote--a bill to protect the Medicaid safety 
net; that the bill be read the third time and passed and the motion to 
reconsider be laid on the table, with no intervening action or debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, there is $38 billion worth of fraud in 
Medicaid. We are on an unsustainable course as a nation. We have $74 
trillion worth of unfunded liabilities. When we talk about controlling 
spending and earmarks, we always hear it is a mandatory program.
  Finally, not all of what the administration has done do I absolutely 
agree with but on key points I do. These rules will make a difference. 
If we are interested in fraud, let's write the regulations to get out 
the fraud. That hasn't been the offer. All we are willing to do as a 
body is say to the administration you have ideas that will get rid of 
$42 billion worth of fraud over 5 years, but we don't like it because 
we are feeling pressure from the State Medicaid directors, when we know 
States game Medicaid. A great example: There is nothing in this to stop 
any Medicaid Program from taking a child from school to the doctor, but 
it does stop the 500-some-odd million dollars being spent on 
transporting schoolchildren back and forth to school who don't have a 
medical appointment. So what we have is a system that has been gamed. 
We have allowed it.
  Now the administration put something forward which we don't like and 
which we ought to negotiate with them to change, rather than saying you 
are not going to do any of it. The fact is the unfunded liabilities 
associated with the Medicaid Program are about $12 trillion. We are 
going to do something--just forget it.
  I applaud the administration for making an effort to try to fix some 
of this. But to say you cannot do any of it, when some of it is very 
badly needed, is wrong. So unfortunately, Mr. Leader, I have to object 
again.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, as I indicated in the last piece of 
legislation we tried to move forward on, would my friend allow us to 
bring it to the floor and debate the issue and offer amendments to it?
  Mr. COBURN. I am objecting not solely for myself. I am happy to work 
on trying to put together a proposal with the administration that would 
make a difference and then bring it to the floor.
  Mr. REID. How long do you think that would take?
  Mr. COBURN. Two weeks.
  Mr. REID. I appreciate that.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington State is 
recognized.
  Mr. COBURN. May I inquire how much longer the Senator is going to be?
  Ms. CANTWELL. Three or four minutes.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be 
recognized following the Senator from Washington.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I say to the majority leader, I 
appreciate what he said on behalf of women. Washington State has one of 
the highest rates of breast cancer in the Nation. We have a very good 
detection program and good survival rates. We don't know the cause of 
it, but we know it is very important to continue the research.
  I know that in 1992, the so-called year of the woman, when we had one 
of the largest classes of women elected to the Congress, we saw an 
increase in women's health research. Why? Because women were in the 
Congress to say it was important to us to not have the research 
directed in a way that favored some of the particular programs that 
were about men's health.
  So I thank my colleague. The majority leader is right to say we have 
to respond to our constituents who are concerned about this issue and 
want to give attention to it. Clearly, women's health research hasn't 
gotten all the attention it deserves in the past.
  Mr. REID. Will the Senator yield?
  Ms. CANTWELL. Yes.
  Mr. REID. Does the Senator acknowledge that with diseases such as 
interstitial fasciitis, more than 90 percent of the people who have 
that disease are women? Women-related diseases have not gotten the 
attention they deserve, and one reason is because the legislature has 
been dominated by men.
  Ms. CANTWELL. That is what we found in the 1990s, in that we didn't 
have enough representation to ask the hard questions, to say our 
constituents were not being heard on this issue and to raise this in 
various committees. Frankly, that was the time period when, for the 
first time, we had a woman on every committee in the House of 
Representatives. Once we got women on every committee, we asked the 
hard questions and increased the percentage of women's health research.
  I think it is a very poignant point to the fact that, while NIH does 
good work, we have to respond to our constituency and, certainly, there 
can be discrepancies and issues that the larger public should have a 
say in as to health research.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.


                            Cancer Research

  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes answering 
the question as to why would one Senator, in the light of all the other 
Senators who have cosponsored this bill, stand and block a bill that 60 
some Senators want to see passed? I think it is a great time for us to 
define what is wrong in our country today.
  What is wrong is we think about the next election far off and more 
often than we think about the next generation. I want us to cure breast 
cancer as badly as anybody else. The point Senator Reid did not tell 
you is we are already spending $100 million on this very subject, the 
environmental connection to breast cancer. We are also spending more on 
breast cancer research than we are any other cancer, and yet it is not 
the leading cause of death.
  We are going to have 160,000 people die this year from lung cancer, 
the

[[Page S3496]]

same number who are going to die from breast cancer, 40,000 of which 
have no relationship to smoking, but you do not see anybody on the 
floor telling the NIH to do a study between the environmental effects 
and nonsmoking-related lung cancer.
  The reason it is important is a little example of penicillin. It is a 
great example. We stumbled onto that through the science of 
microbiology, but we would never have gotten there if we had told the 
NIH: Study scarlet fever and find a cure; study strep tonsillitis and 
find a cure; study syphilis and find a cure; study gonorrhea, and we 
had gone four or five different ways. The point I am making is basic 
research is what we ought to be doing.
  In the mid-nineties, I was one of the strong advocates for increasing 
the size of the NIH budget. It ought to be twice what it is today. The 
reason it is not $60 billion a year instead of $29 billion is because 
we will not fix the waste in Medicaid of $42 billion over 5 years, we 
will not fix the $90 billion in fraud in Medicare, we will not fix the 
$8 billion that was paid out by the Pentagon for performance bonuses 
that nobody earned last year, we will not fix the $50 billion that is 
associated with waste within the Pentagon. Nobody will fix it. We had 
one wheelchair that was sold multiple times for $5 million to Medicare 
in Florida alone--one wheelchair. We will not do the hard work that 
creates the long-term best interest for our country, but we will 
certainly respond to--granted, very real issues, but in an 
inappropriate way that does not get us where we want to go.
  The NIH budget spends more on breast cancer research than any other 
research. We are going to spend $100 million on research on the link 
between breast cancer and the environment. Plus, the Defense Department 
is going to spend another $138 million, and the Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention combined is greater than $1 billion. There is 
not any other disease we do that on right now. Yet we are going to tell 
them to do more of the same they are already doing, and we are never 
going to think about the other people with other diseases, the other 
2,037 diseases that are not as well organized and have nowhere close to 
the same investment at NIH.
  The point is, the hardcore, heavy-duty, peer-reviewed science ought 
to guide us, not emotion, not my poor cousin Sharon Wetz who died 6, 7 
years ago of breast cancer, not my sister who has breast cancer, not my 
sister-in-law who has breast cancer. What we ought to be doing is what 
is in the best overall good for this country as a whole. And if we need 
to spend more money on breast cancer, then the way to do that is to get 
rid of some of the waste and double NIH, but any dollar we spend on 
breast cancer is a dollar we are not going to spend on colon cancer, it 
is a dollar we are not going to spend on thyroid cancer, it is a dollar 
we are not going to spend on lymphoma, because we are going to take it 
away.
  In this bill, it says this should not interfere with peer-reviewed 
research. If that is the case, then this will never get appropriated. 
So either this bill is about doing research or it is about a press 
event for a politician. I will tell you, I think it is the latter.
  In 2006, we modernized the NIH to keep exactly this thing from not 
happening. We took away all the silos. We gave the Director the power 
and the authority to start making great decisions based on what the raw 
science was telling him so when we invest in raw science, we magnify 
the potential benefits that come from it. Now we are going to go back 
and say we are going to start picking diseases; we are going to start 
managing it. Why do we need a staff at NIH? Let's let the Senate pick 
every disease and how much we are going to spend on every one of them; 
we obviously are qualified.
  We are not qualified.
  I find it amazing--I do not doubt Senator Reid's story, but as a 
surgical resident in 1984, I was doing cystoscopies and diagnosing 
interstitial cystitis. We didn't think it was psychosomatic. We knew it 
was a real disease 3 years before Senator Reid came to the Senate.
  The question politicians ought to be asking is what is NIH doing? 
Where is the oversight on what they are doing? Find out what they are 
doing. How does their work rank in comparison to the other disease 
initiatives at NIH? We have not had a hearing on that issue.
  The HELP Committee has had hearings on multiple speciality disease 
bills. So we are back into answering a real need, but maybe it is not 
the best priority. What if we spent the same money we are going to 
spend on this disease and we got a breakthrough that cured all cancers, 
but because we decided we were going to reconnect with one specific 
aspect of one potential risk for one cancer, we missed it?
  The wisdom of this body has to be to think in the big picture and in 
the long term. I have diagnosed breast cancer over 500 times in my 
medical practice. It is a gut-wrenching, life-changing disease. 
Fortunately, we have had great improvements in it and our diagnostic 
skills are getting better, especially with digital MRI on breast 
examination. Early diagnosis has an impact, but what we do and how we 
do it is going to matter.
  I will put forward that Senator Reid can bring this bill to the 
floor, and if he brings it and we take the time--and I am more than 
happy to take 4 or 5 days to talk about how we should work at NIH, and 
I am happy to do that--and the bill will pass, but then are we going to 
do the same thing with every other disease the HELP Committee brought 
out? There are about eight other bills just like this bill. We are 
going to tell NIH: You have to spend this money here, you have to do it 
here. Regardless of what the raw molecular science says, regardless of 
what the peer-reviewed literature says, we are going to tell them what 
to do. Consequently, we are going to delay scientific discovery.
  My opposition is not that I don't want to cure breast cancer. My 
opposition is not that I don't want us to find a cure. I want to find a 
cure for all of them. I am a two-time cancer survivor. I would love to 
prevent colon cancer. I don't like walking around with half a colon. 
There are a lot of consequences to it. I don't like having melanoma and 
having half my neck taken away. I don't like it, but I don't want colon 
cancer to displace possible cures for everybody and in the best 
interest of this country.
  Will I object? Every time I come to the floor I will object because I 
think the ultimate underlying policy is wrong. The way we solve breast 
cancer in this country is double the NIH funding and let science drive 
the way we need to go. The way we double NIH funding is get rid of the 
$300 billion waste, fraud, and abuse that is in the discretionary 
budget every year which most of us don't have the courage to attack 
because it might gore somebody's ox.
  To those who have breast cancer, as a physician and somebody who has 
been through cancer, I know your fear. I have been there. I have 
experienced the questions. I have experienced the chemotherapy. I have 
experienced the losing of 30 or 40 pounds. I have experienced the 
nausea and vomiting that is persistent with you for 4 or 6 months. Most 
of all, what I have experienced is, we have a great health care system 
and great research in this country that is saving a lot of lives. If we 
will get our hands out of it as politicians, they will be able to save 
a whole lot more lives than when we put our hands into it and tell them 
what they must and shall do.

  I thank the good Lord for the time he has given me. I am 5 years out 
this month from colon cancer. There is no guarantee, but while I am 
alive, I am going to do things that are in the best long-term interest 
of our research for health care, that give us the most life for the 
dollars that we invest. If that is pleasing politically, great. If it 
is displeasing politically, it is OK too. What is important is we are 
good stewards--not just with the money but with the direction to allow 
science to lead us to cures.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Brown). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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